A man shovels snow in front of an office of Promsvyazbank in Moscow. Photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Four private banks with friendly ties with the Kremlin are emerging as big winners from Russia’s economic crisis, helping out dollar-starved companies at a time when large state lenders are hampered by Western sanctions.

The four, FC Otkritie, Promsvyazbank, Credit Bank of Moscow and B&N Bank, were relatively minor players only a few years ago.

Now they are major beneficiaries of a bank recapitalisation plan and have used central bank foreign currency refinancing tools to win business lending to state energy firms and others needing to meet big overseas debt repayments.

By contrast, sanctions over the Ukraine conflict have closed international capital markets to state lenders such as Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank and private ones owned by allies of President Vladimir Putin such as Bank Rossiya.

The state banks are also unable to use foreign currency refinancing tools from the central bank for more than 30 days due to risks for Western clearing banks.

“Private banks are carving themselves out a position by increasing lending to large industrial companies, whereas they used to have to wait in a queue behind state banking giants,” said Chris Weafer, senior partner at Macro Advisory consultancy and a long-serving financial analyst based in Moscow.

“We are seeing the emergence of a new banking sector post-crisis.”

“Large private banks have been used more and more as prime channels to finance strategic sectors as the large state banks have been sanctioned,” said Vladimir Miklashevsky, trading strategist and economist at Danske Bank.

They have shared in the spoils from a large-scale bank recapitalisation programme costing the state over 800 billion roubles that was agreed late last year.

Otkritie received 65 billion roubles of OFZ government bonds in May, while Promsvyazbank got 30 billion roubles of the bonds in August, Credit Bank of Moscow received around 20 billion roubles of them in June and B&N Bank has been promised a further nine billion roubles’ worth, the banks and the government have said.

Otkritie alone saw the amount it borrowed under repurchase agreements (repos) with the central bank jump over eightfold to 695 billion roubles over the course of 2014, which allowed it in turn to ramp up lending to clients.

The repos were used to help state oil major Rosneft, run by a close ally of Putin, Igor Sechin, refinance large Western debts at the end of last and start of this year, according to an industry source and a banking source.

Anton Lopatin, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, said out of the roughly $32 billion the central bank had lent to Russian banks via forex repo operations, Otkritie owed about $18 billion.

With large debt repayments due from September, attention is turning to how Russian firms will be able to cope given that global capital markets remain frozen for them.

Analysts say private banks could once again help by giving loans to those scrambling for foreign currency.